AP - CHELSEA, Vt. - A prosecutor has dropped charges against a woman who was arrested for staring at and making faces at a police dog.

“Prosecuting a woman for ’staring’ at a police dog is absurd,” said her lawyer. “People are allowed to make faces at police dogs and officers to express their disapproval. It’s constitutional expression,” said public defender Kelly Green, who represented Jayna Hutchinson.

Hutchinson, 33, of Lebanon, N.H., was charged with cruelty to a police animal and resisting arrest after a July 31 incident in West Fairlee in which police were called to a market to investigate a report of a brawl. They were approached by Hutchinson, who told one officer she had been assaulted the day before by one of the men involved.

She asked Vermont State Police Sgt. Todd Protzman to take her statement but he refused, telling her she smelled like alcohol and was drunk but that he would take her statement at another time.

After a heated exchange, she approached Protzman’s cruiser, where his dog Max was waiting, putting her face within inches of the window and “staring at him in a taunting/harassing manner,” Protzman wrote in an affidavit.

“While the defendant taunted my canine, Max was focused on the defendant and the perceived threat she presented to him,” the affidavit said. “He was no longer focused on me and the other officers at the scene.”

jay: i love cop talk. ‘my canine’ is really something else. is there something the matter with saying ‘my dog?’ or ‘the animal?’ i don’t think there is. do cops talk that way because they think it sounds both more professional and more hard-ass? also, it’s sad when canines lose focus.

dan: what’s up, my canine? my sister from another litter! my pooch from another cooch!

jay: pooch from another cooch?!

cates: we have irritating policespeak in the uk, too. criminals are always “perpetrators”. people never head north; they always “proceed in a northerly direction”. and the police never lock anyone up; they “deprive them of their liberty”. i’m sure it’s just an attempt to reverse the totally unjustified and widespread opinion that cops are intellectually sub-normal.

jay: pooch from another cooch?!

dan: over the line?

UPI — EAGLE CREEK, Ore., May 28 Police were looking for an Oregon man who allegedly locked three pigs in his home hoping they would trash it after the house went into foreclosure.

Detective Jim Strovink of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office said Shane Lovett of Eagle Creek had been distraught about the foreclosure and joked to neighbors he had locked the pigs in his home more than a week ago without any food or water, KGW-TV in Portland, Ore., reported Monday.

Deputies responded to a neighbor’s complaint about the pigs and found the inside and outside of the house had been trashed. Thomas Getten, an animal rescue expert, said the pigs were dehydrated but otherwise healthy after he coaxed them outside.

jay: that’s some good olde-fashioned country ingenuity. i think the urban version is letting tweakers squat in your foreclosed condo until the boys in blue show up.

By KATE BRUMBACK, Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet 4, from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.

Jamison, who killed his first deer at age 5, was hunting with father Mike Stone and two guides in east Alabama on May 3 when he bagged Monster Pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

“It feels really good,” Jamison said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a good accomplishment. I probably won’t ever kill anything else that big.”

via jon schreiber

jay: don’t sell yourself short, kid. if you can dream it, you can kill it — pigs the size of volkswagens, giant mutant chickens, cerberus. and i know i’m going to seem like some sort of yankee liberal elitist buzzkill here, but wasn’t may 3rd a tuesday? why wasn’t your gun-toting cracker ass in school?

rob: just wait until that hog’s daddy finds that little bastard….

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — A 400-pound gorilla escaped from his enclosure and ran amok in a Rotterdam zoo Friday, biting one woman, dragging her around, and causing panic among dozens of visitors before he was finally subdued, officials and a witness said.

The Diergaarde Blijdorp zoo was evacuated and the 11-year-old gorilla, named Bokito, was eventually contained in a restaurant within the park, police spokeswoman Yvette de Rave said.

Four people were injured, including the woman who was bitten, zoo director Ton Dorrestijn said.

Bokito was shot with a sedative dart and recaptured, said zoo spokeswoman Lilian Jonkers, but she couldn’t say what his condition was. It was not immediately clear how he managed to climb the high stone walls surrounding his enclosure.

“He got over the moat, which in itself is remarkable, because gorillas can’t swim,” Dorrestijn said.

jay: turns out that maybe they can swim, my dutch friend. something tells me you won’t be underestimating our primate relatives again. also, alternate title for this post: lowland gorilla attacks low country zoo visitors! the AP really could have done a lot with this headline but all they could come up with was ‘Gorilla wreaks havoc in zoo escape.’ yawn.

dan: yes, jay, but you my friend are channeling the ny post edit staff. kudos on the killer heds!

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) - Police in Tacoma are investigating the discovery of a dead fawn that was found dressed like an infant and was left abandoned at the Pantages Theater.

Police spokesman Mark Fulghum said an officer made the bizarre discovery shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday.

Tom Sayre with The Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce County said the newborn deer was placed in a basket and was wearing an infant sleeper and a bib that read “You think I’m cute? You should see my aunt.”

It is not clear how the animal died. Sayre said a Humane Society veterinarian thinks it might have been stillborn.

jay: huh? your aunt? basket? help. i don’t understand.

dan: but hey, at least she died at the theater, which is her one true love.

AP - WICHITA, Kan. - A sixth-grader stabbed to death a mother duck and two ducklings that had nested near a school, distressing the other children and alarming officials who said the boy needs mental health treatment.

Students at Wilbur Middle School had named the mother duck Lucy and were monitoring her and her brood, making sure no one disturbed the nest in a grassy creek bed. Their mutilated bodies — stabbed with a pencil — were found this week.

An announcement over the public address system led the boy to admit the killings, officials said. They said he had also talked about the act to classmates and didn’t understand why it was wrong.

…

Wilbur students and staff held a ceremony Thursday “to share their grief for these animals,” [mental health crisis coordinator Liz] McGinness said.

jay: snakes, snails, puppy dog tails, and murderous impulses. though maybe he was making a statement about the animal condition and human hypocrisy. we eat chicken, don’t we? and shoot duck for sport? cheney does it with scalia (with shotguns, in the duck blind), why can’t i do it (with a pencil, in the grassy creek bed)? why do these ducks get to live while so many others should die? sometimes it’s hard to put things into words when you’re an enraged 10-year-old. or maybe he’s just nuts and felt like killing something.

dan: i don’t know, jay. kid looks like a pretty textbook sociopath. but i’m not sure we know the whole story, either. sometimes, ducks have it coming.

by David Ljunggren — OTTAWA (Reuters) — The first stage of Canada’s controversial annual harp seal hunt is likely to be scrapped…

jay: whoo hoo!

…because the ice floes where pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned, officials and animal rights activists said on Tuesday.

jay: oh. my. god. boooo. i was so amped when i saw the headline thinking that there was some kind of hidden benefit to climate change. alas, no. it’s kind of worse.

dan: and hear i thought it meant that they just couldn’t keep the PBR cold enough to make it an event.

AP — SUPERIOR, Wis. — A 20-year-old man received probation after he was convicted of having sexual contact with a dead deer. The sentence also requires Bryan James Hathaway to be evaluated as a sex offender and treated at the Institute for Psychological and Sexual Health in Duluth, Minn.

“The state believes that particular place is the best to provide treatment for the individual,” Assistant District Attorney Jim Boughner said.

He was found guilty in April 2005 of felony mistreatment of an animal after he killed a horse with the intention of having sex with it. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail and two years of extended supervision on that charge as well as six years of probation for taking and driving a vehicle without the owner’s consent.

Hathaway pleaded no contest earlier this month to misdemeanor mistreatment of an animal for the incident involving the deer. He was sentenced Tuesday in Douglas County Circuit Court.

“The type of behavior is disturbing,” Judge Michael Lucci said. “It’s disturbing to the public. It’s disturbing to the court.”

jay: <<speechless>>

dan: okay, equally speechless, or almost speechless, but then there’s this: that’s a crime?! i mean, you can kill a deer, right? that’s not a crime. not with a license anyway. and one assumes that there’s no law (federal or local, as opposed to natural law) against buying some ground beef and diddling it. so, um, where’s the regulatory violation?

sorry. i find this young man to be way freaky. i’m just not sure how he’s a lawbreaker.